There was a time when a Sunday morning without a hangover used to mean a Saturday night wasted. Those days are more or less behind me now and most Sunday mornings you are likely to find me in the swimming pool. Just across the road from the pool is a large Victorian Catholic church and as I head back for breakfast the parishioners are going in for their 9.30 mass. The parish banner of the Virgin Mary was at the London Mayday demonstration for migrant rights last year and Tower Hamlets churches were much more evident than the area’s socialists at the event. A seed of curiosity was planted that day. This morning, chlorine scented,  I went to Mass without the necessity of wedding or funeral.

Here was a glimpse of another world. The church has two Masses every Sunday and this one was full. There were about three hundred people in the congregation and they were a pretty good age and race mix of the local area, if we set aside the Bangladeshis. Any political organisation that could organise something similar within the same boundaries would be a force to reckon with and this was being repeated in five or six churches in the borough.

You can form an orderly queue to sneer but there was something moving about the experience. The ceremony is conducted by a priest wearing robes that would not have been incongruous in Byzantium one thousand years ago in a beautifully designed and decorated building. All these people were present because they believed in the same thing and they were from every inhabited continent. They knew too that all across the world millions of people were doing exactly the same thing and that they were part of a community. I felt very jealous of them. Their church gives them an identity, a way of looking at the world, a community that gives them support. Prayers were offered for sick members of the parish who were all mentioned by name. For family members present that must have given a rare feeling of being in solidarity with the hundreds of other Catholics in the parish. More cynical readers may wish to point out that the congregation was being asked to invite its god to suspend the laws of human biology. Those same cynics may one day be grateful that prayers were offered for those “who live without the comfort of the knowledge of life after death.”

My recollection of going to Mass in Ireland is that both priest and congregation reckon on forty five to fifty minutes duration and I had made some turkey roasting calculations based on this estimate. Things seem to be done differently in England and the priest began by announcing that Mass would include the baptism of three children called Ellie, Dean and Liam. Now when you hear “baptism” and “child” in the same sentence you expect a bawling foetus. Not so. These three ranged in age from about nine to thirteen and they were dressed entirely in white with the boys wearing white satin waistcoats that the Bee Gees would have judged flash.

And that’s where it all went wrong. Tribal initiation rites, like baptism, are one of the things that our species has used to great evolutionary advantage. The best advice that the priest could have given to one of the children was to cut down on the chocolate, kebabs and pizza. Instead he performed an exorcism on all three. It was a very low key kind of exorcism. We didn’t see any screaming flying devils but the very concept was absurd, just like his walk through the church sprinkling “holy” water on the congregation. It’s easy for us to mock but the children’s extended family was sitting in the first two or three pews and it was a big event for them, one which they will be able to watch again and again on the video which the uncle was recording. When they watch the video they will hear and see that hundreds of people clapped at the moment these children became part of the community. That sense of intense belonging to something big is rare these days.

For someone accustomed to Irish Catholicism’s former assertiveness its English cousin always seemed to be the timid cousin. At the moment though it seems to be flexing its muscles and while the radical left cannot persuade any prominent Labour figure to commit to anything resembling a principle Cormac Murphy-O’Connor and Keith O’Brien are making Gordon Brown look like an impotent fool without knowing very much about science. There is no reason to listen to them but they are able to humiliate a government.

Can you draw any big conclusion from this? Probably not. The media is willing to use religious figures to pretend it has a story and lots of people are willing to sit and listen to barmy fairy stories because they want to be part of something.